Caught the rebroadcast of the Oct. 17, 1946 episode of the Burns & Allen show last night on the Antioch OTR station (1710 AM in Ohio, http://radio.macinmind.com/ online). In the midst of the adventure, titled “Gracie Wants George to Replace Clark Gable,” the show’s announcer rushes in when he hears the name “Louella Parsons.”
“Louella’s going to be here? I have a story for her column.”
I just found out that Ronald Reagan beats his wife Jane Wyman every morning.”
“Oh, no!”
“Yes, he beats her into the kitchen and helps himself to the first cup of refreshing Maxwell House Coffee.”

Simper Guy’s new song about smelly feet is a hoot, but has got a sensitive backstory.
Simper Guy is an army vet, his shift shortlived because, as he puts it, “I’m a wimp—not that I deserted or anything.” He has fraught recollections of the scene in the barracks, especially of a bunkmate with “feet that stunk so bad he was being studied as a new form of gas-based weaponry.” The song “Stinkfoot Stomp” is dedicated to this unnamed soldier, whose legacy is to have challenged no less than the smell of napalm in the morning.

Geography of a Horse Dreamer and Curse of the Starving Class at the Bullfinch. Both bands’ songs are nearly as wordy as their band names… Operation Sidewinder and The Holy Ghostly covering the zeitgeist at Hamilton’s… Fractious metal nite with The God of Hell and Back Bog Beast Bait at D’ollaire’s…

We broke up the band before we threatened to play again.

Paul Simon, Songwriter

Paul Simon’s a maddening figure in modern music for me, and not because I have regularly been told I resemble him. (Admittedly, at certain angles it’s uncanny, but I liked it better when someone told me long ago that I looked like Timothy Dalton.) You can argue that he’s never delivered utter crap, but he’s certainly inspired others to create it.
A 31-track greatest-hits album allows for some brilliant less-commercial works to gain overdue appreciation. “Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War” in particular is a Simon song no radio programmer has given me a chance to grow tired of. “Quality,” from the Capeman musical, seems to touch lightly on every facet of Simon’s career, from youthful doo-wop to winsome folk strains to faint African rhythms.
The fact that he’s had so many hits has denied Paul Simon a proper career overview until now.

Knuckler: My Life With Baseball’s Most Confounding Pitch
By Tim Wakefield with Tony Massarotti. Foreword by Phil Niekro (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)

Funny to pick up what you think is an autobiography or memoir and find that it’s written in the third-person. That’s what throwing knuckleballs will do to your brain, I guess. This is really a straight-out biography by ace old-school Boston sportswriter Phil Niekro about Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield, in which Wakefield apparently got involved enough to rate the main cover credit.
All is explained in the Acknowledgements section, where Wakefield and Niekro are referred to respectively as “the author and writer.” They jointly thank the usual range of colleagues, family members and those with special knowledge of the subject at hand. (“Because the knuckleball is the ultimate specialty, true experts were required”). First, however, they spend a full page acknowledging editors and agents who “demonstrated an especially high level of tolerance during the negotiations, a process that most everyone generally finds stressful.”

Well, what would a baseball book be without complex contract negotiations?

The subtitle leads you to believe that there might be some instructional, or at least philosophical element about Wakefield’s signature pitch. There isn’t. Flat-out linear chronological bio of a ballplayer.

Dig the tents, folks. Love reading the signs—like primitive Tweets of revolution. Seeing you just lounge around the Green debating issues and strumming guitars is as cool as any of the (many so far) organized rallies and events.
Beautiful weekend for Occupying New Haven, no?
Activism-wise, I never was much of a joiner. My skills veer more towards indoor pageantry and letter-writing. Never needed there to be an organized struggle before I sounded off. Didn’t need out to be a social thing.
But the Occupy [insert place name here] movement is appealing. It involves mass gathering, but is less vindictive than, say, those anti-corporate demonstrations in the ‘80s where people blocked the entrances to big buildings rather than just contemplated their meaning.
Fraught with less violence than other forms of largescale physical protest, Occupy is more like camping or flash mobbing. Its the anti- capitalists’ answers to the tour of classy houses in Newport.
The rich are different than you and me. Discuss.

Monkey Gum
Salt Water Taffy
Sweet & Sour Spray
Mike & Ike (14 oz. tub from Market Basket)
Cherry Sours
German Raspberries
Werther’s Original Hard Candies
Candy fruit slices (with a surfeit of red ones)
Mini-Marshmallows—“soft and fluffy every time!”

“Kami was visiting colleges, stopped in this cool coffeehouse, spent the whole afternoon there, and got us a gig. She ended up deferring school another year, but the coffeehouse liked us and had us back. Then the place turned into more of a club. We were one of the first bands they asked to be a weekly houseband, on Sundays. I don’t think they thought we’d actually do it. They were being polite mostly. Good friends, you know?”
But we all know how hard it is to say no to a steady gig. So now it’s a once-a-week, 200-mile commute for the New Settlers. A few tangential perks like a courier job have made it more worthwhile, but the passion for the trip was already there.
“If we really minded, we wouldn’t do it. We can’t all make every show so we’ve basically developed a second band—New Settlers West, or the New West Settlers—with counterparts for every one of us. They’re not substitutes, they’re full members.
But no matter what, at least two of us are there every week, and we’re all there once a month. That’s our pact, our band standard. The club says they’re cool with us missing a week here or there, but we’re not. It’s our country house, our home away from home.”

The big night. We “forget” to play, and just party.

Emil & Friends, Lo & Behold. Watch out! Your parents’ 1970s record collection has been copulating in the corner, and the spawn has been released. It’s like the Carpenters with Elton John on piano, Rick Derringer standing by for solos and 10cc overdubbing echoes while Kool & the Gang simmers in the corner. Not a mash-up. A fluid blending of an entire day of classic AM radio.